For those reasons I suspect that all I am doing is helping you put where we are in perspective. To reiterate, I am not
saying anything about the future. I will do that in the concluding chapter of this book. All I want to do is bring you
up to date and, in the process, make clear how these cycles have worked in the past, which will also alert you to
the markers to watch out for and help you see where in the cycles the major countries are and what is likely to
come next.
The chart below from Chapter 1 shows this play out via the eight measures of strength—education, innovation and
technology, competitiveness, military, trade, output, financial center, and reserve status—that we capture in the
aggregate charts. It shows the average of each of these measures of strength, with most of the weight on the most
recent three reserve countries (the US, the UK, and the Dutch).1
As explained in Chapter 1, in brief these strengths and weaknesses are mutually reinforcing—i.e., strengths and
weaknesses in education, competitiveness, economic output, share of world trade, etc., contribute to the others
being strong or weak, for logical reasons—and their order is broadly indicative of the processes that lead to the
rising and declining of empires. For example, quality of education has been the long-leading strength of rises and
declines in these measures of power, and the long-lagging strength has been the reserve currency. That is because
strong education leads to strengths in most areas, including the creation of the world’s most common currency.
That common currency, just like the world’s common language, tends to stay around because the habit of usage
lasts longer than the strengths that made it so commonly used.
We will now look at the specifics more closely, starting with how these Big Cycles have played out over the last
500 years and then looking at the declines of the Dutch and British empires so you can see how these things go.
1) The Last 500 Years in About 4,000 Words
The Rise & Decline of the Dutch Empire and the Dutch Guilder
In the 1500-1600 period the Spanish empire was the pre-eminent economic empire in the “Western”
world while the Chinese empire under the Ming Dynasty was the most powerful empire in the
“Eastern” world, even more powerful than the Spanish empire (see the green dashed line and the red